Cursably cool

There‚Äôs not much wealth in this get-rich-quick scheme, but the Pink Eye Prints partners are loving the process

Jon Keefe and Jessica Smith are Pink Eye Prints, and with their handmade equipment in their St. John‚Äôs basement, they‚Äôre getting ready to take over the world. ‚ÄĒ Photo by Sarah Smellie/Special to The Telegram

It started as a get-rich-quick scheme, dreamed up on a vacation in Columbia. But for Jon Keefe and Jessica Smith, their small T-shirt printing business, Pink Eye Prints, has evolved into a passion.

‚ÄúAnd, as it turns out, making T-shirts is not a good way to get rich quick,‚ÄĚ laughs Keefe.

Smith, a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and Keefe, a programmer, started Pink Eye about a year ago, when Keefe found a half-price silk screen printing press at Michaels.

‚ÄúI did some print in school and I always wanted to do silk screen, but it was the most popular class,‚ÄĚ says Smith. ‚ÄúIt was always full and I could never get into it. Jon and I were roommates, and when he came home with that, I went out and got one, too.‚ÄĚ

‚ÄúThen we aligned forces,‚ÄĚ says Keefe.

Their first contract was making T-shirts for the Peter Easton Pub, in Rabbittown. They made the pub 50 T-shirts with the Peter Easton logo emblazoned on the chest.

‚ÄúMan, what a battle that was,‚ÄĚ says Keefe. ‚ÄúIt was a lot harder than we thought it was going to be. We made a lot of mistakes. But we got better and better.‚ÄĚ

After that, they managed to upgrade their equipment. Keefe found plans on the Internet to build a four-colour press and enlisted his father, a retired engineer. In just a few weeks, they had a professional-grade screen print press with two T-shirt stations and one station for paper.

Shop class

‚ÄúThis whole thing is handmade,‚ÄĚ says Keefe, gesturing to the wooden, four-foot-wide printing machine that occupies most of the far end of Keefe‚Äôs low-ceilinged downtown basement, whose walls are covered in test prints and transparencies. ‚ÄúIt‚Äôs all just wood. We used regular C-clamps, and there‚Äôs even a swivel from a bar stool from the Peter Easton.‚ÄĚ

They also build a screen stretcher, to put the silk screens onto the metal frames that they use.

‚ÄúBetween my Dad and I, it took us about a week to build it,‚ÄĚ he says. ‚ÄúAnd it cost us two or three hundred bucks ‚ÄĒ lumber was the biggest cost. If you were going to buy one of these yourself, you‚Äôd probably pay about two thousand bucks.‚ÄĚ

With the new rig, Keefe and Smith can crank out 40 to 50 shirts an hour, depending on how many colours they‚Äôre using.

‚ÄúThen we cover it in this liquid emulsion,‚ÄĚ says Keefe, ‚Äúwhich is basically like glue with photoreactive stuff in it.‚ÄĚ

They print their images, in black, onto transparencies, one for each colour that they‚Äôd like to print. Then they place a transparency on top of the screen and put it under a special light table.

‚ÄúEverything black is going to block the light,‚ÄĚ says Keefe. ‚ÄúAnd where the light does come through, it hardens the emulsion.‚ÄĚ Once the screen is dry, they remove it from the light table. The emulsion under the black image, which hasn‚Äôt completely hardened, just crumbles off.

‚ÄúThen we‚Äôre ready to print on a shirt,‚ÄĚ he says. ‚ÄúWe place the shirt on the stand, load in the screen, lay it down, and squeegee on the colour.‚ÄĚ

They use a spray adhesive to keep the shirt in place on the stand. Even the slightest movement could throw off the next colour and the shirt would be ruined.

‚ÄúIt‚Äôs kind of a perfect mix of technical and artistic skill,‚ÄĚ says Keefe.

Next step

Pink Eye produced shirts for local bands like Kill Popoff, Be Alright and Monsterbator. Then they ventured into printing on paper.

For that, they had to build a vacuum table: a box topped with a piece of pegboard with a vacuum hose attached, to keep the paper sucked down in place.

Keefe‚Äôs father built that, too.

‚ÄúThat‚Äôs a real, live Shop Vac attached there,‚ÄĚ laughs Smith. ‚ÄúWhen we started printing on paper, we had to learn everything all over again.‚ÄĚ

On March 22, they released a zine called ‚ÄúA Whale and Other Disorders‚ÄĚ comprised of artwork by Keefe, Smith, Steve Abbott and others, and poetry by Anthony Brenton. Each zine was 12 pages long, hand-printed by Pink Eye from front to back, and the spines were hand sewn. To balance the costs of the mistakes they would inevitably make in this, their first real print venture, they used cans of Behr house paint instead of expensive printing inks.

The result was a bright, brilliantly coloured book of provocative art, some of which verges on the grotesque.

‚ÄúThe zines sold out almost immediately,‚ÄĚ says Keefe.

They‚Äôre hoping to publish ‚ÄúA Whale and Other Disorders‚ÄĚ four times a year, with the second issue scheduled for June, though they still consider the zine a side project.

The big project they‚Äôve been consumed with is ‚ÄúThe Mechanical Egg Bughouse,‚ÄĚ a book of poetry by Anthony Brenton. Also hand-printed and hand-sewn, the copies they delivered to Afterwords bookstore are steadily flying of the shelves.

‚ÄúI did art for a previous book of his, called ‚ÄėNear Death, Maccles,‚Äô‚ÄĚ says Smith. ‚ÄúHe approached us and asked us to do a bit of art, and we just decided to print the whole thing.‚ÄĚ

‚ÄúWe never would have thought, this time last year, that we‚Äôd be publishing books,‚ÄĚ says Keefe. ‚ÄúBut we‚Äôre going to keep going with that. Anthony has bankers boxes full of unpublished work.‚ÄĚ

‚ÄúEven now, we‚Äôre still learning so much,‚ÄĚ adds Keefe. ‚ÄúWe‚Äôve done some cool stuff, but I feel like a rank amateur some days.‚ÄĚ

‚ÄúBut then some days, I feel like a god,‚ÄĚ says Smith. ‚ÄúLike, ‚ÄėI can do anything!‚Äô‚ÄĚ

Though Smith is the one with background in art, the design and the technical operation is shared equally by the two.

‚ÄúIt‚Äôs a real collaboration, everything works out to be half and half,‚ÄĚ says Smith. ‚ÄúOne of us will have an idea or a drawing and we‚Äôll work together to make it into a digital image and bring it to the press. Usually when we start swearing about how cool it is, we know we‚Äôve got it.‚ÄĚ

This summer, they‚Äôre hoping to do a lot more swearing as they move beyond T-shirts and paper.

‚ÄúWe realized that we could print on wood just like we print on paper,‚ÄĚ says Keefe, ‚Äúso we‚Äôre going to make chess boards and games.‚ÄĚ

‚ÄúAnd we‚Äôd like to work more with fabric,‚ÄĚ says Smith. ‚ÄúPillow covers, curtains, home decor stuff. We‚Äôre going to really buckle down this summer and have some great stuff ready for craft season. We could do wallpaper if we wanted to.‚ÄĚ

Jon Keefe and Jessica Smith are Pink Eye Prints, and with their handmade equipment in their St. John‚Äôs basement, they‚Äôre getting ready to take over the world. ‚ÄĒ Photo by Sarah Smellie/Special to The Telegram